by R. D. Rosen
Every case started as a huge empty space, a hangar filled with silence and clutter. You found the door to a room, bigger than you’d like but much smaller than a hangar, and in it you might find the door to a somewhat smaller room, and finally, with luck, to the hallway that narrowed inexorably to the truth cowering at the end of it. Harvey now had the feeling he might be walking in that hallway.
Fathon turned into a doorway and flipped on the light, illuminating a colorless, windowless room lined with tall fireproof metal file cabinets. In the middle was a long Formica table, and on it were piles of manila folders, accordion files, phone directories, and loose papers.
“Have a seat,” Fathon said. “So you used to play baseball?”
“I did.”
“And now you’re a private investigator.”
“I am.”
“That’s an odd combination.”
“I’m an odd person.”
“Life has a way of reducing us to our oddities, doesn’t it? It’s a distillation process.”
“You’re young to be knowing that.”
“Cripples start out odd. It’s harder for us to maintain the illusion of normalcy. Now, if I’ve pulled the right file, the one Maurice’s lady friend was telling you about, you have to keep in mind how rare lynchings have been for the last seventy years. You don’t mind a little perspective, do you?”
“Always grateful for it.”
“I do love a captive audience. Between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Depression—that’s almost fifty years—there were almost three thousand lynchings recorded in this country, more than eighty percent of them blacks. Some academics claim there were over three thousand lynchings by the year nineteen-eighteen, but let’s go with the lower number—just under three thousand by the nineteen-thirties. And, while I’m at it, let me ask you how many people you think were ever convicted of any crime associated with a lynching between the years of eighteen-eighty and nineteen-oh-five.”
“None?”
“Bingo. As you know, they lynched one of yours right here in Five Points—Leo Frank, in nineteen-fifteen, convicted two years before of murdering a Mary Phagan here at the pencil factory he managed for his uncle in New York. Convicted him on the perjured testimony, ironically, of the black man who most likely was the murderer. Those were the days when one drop of black blood, and you were as good as a nigger. The hatred of the black man shifted to hatred of white niggers, the unseen enemy, those who looked white but were thought to be black inside. And Leo Frank was ground up in the wheels of that new logic. His lynching got more press than any hundred black lynchings, although they used to advertise a lot of black lynchings in the local newspapers, just as they might a circus or a traveling Shakespeare theater company. Talk about the complicity of local law enforcement.”
He shook his head when a manila folder he yanked from under a pile turned out not to be the one he was looking for. “Now I don’t know why this happens to be in my head, but I do recall seeing an old clip of some lynching coverage in the Arkansas Gazette in which it was noted that the lynching was ‘conducted in a quiet fashion,’ as if the issue was the comportment of the murderers. ‘Conducted in a quiet fashion.’ That’s like complimenting the Nazis for having their shirts tucked in. Fascinating, isn’t it? In the annals of man, of course, I’m talking”—he snapped his fingers—“that long ago. But there it is. You do know that it was customary to take souvenir photos of lynchings?”
“Moss showed me the one of his grandfather.”
“And that the body was often dismembered and parts of it—the genitals, fingers, toes, and pieces of the major organs—sold as souvenirs? You ask most people what lynching is, and they’ll tell you a vigilante mob hanging, when in fact lynching often didn’t involve hanging at all, but the torturing and burning of a human body. And for what? The charges ranged from acting suspiciously and using inflammatory language to entering a white woman’s room. Or addressing her at all. I’m talking about Emmett Louis Till. Nineteen-fifty-five. His mama insisted on an open casket so the world could see what they had done to that poor boy. His head didn’t even look like a head anymore.” Harvey could easily see Fathon wooing a jury—chest thrust out, baritone booming, punctuating his summation with a flourish of that withered leg.
He began pawing through folders. “I got it out for you a few hours ago, and already I don’t know what I did with it. I have no idea how I got through law school with my pathetic organizational skills. Do you know where the term ‘lynching’ comes from? I’m not even going to wait for an answer. Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia plantation owner and veteran of the Revolutionary War, took to punishing miscreants after the war—Tories, mostly—by holding court on his land and then tying the defendant to a tree in his front yard and beating him. Without an ounce of legal jurisdiction. It was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the phenomenon, now bearing his name, came to include such improvements as burning and hanging. But I began by telling you how rare they are nowadays.”
He resumed looking for the file, saying, “Between Reconstruction and the Great Depression we’re talking about one lynching a week, every week, for fifty years. Now in the entire decade of the nineteen-thirties there were only eighty or ninety, and since then there’ve been just a handful. Most recently, as you know, the dragging to death of Jerome Byrd in nineteen-ninety-eight. Well, now, here we go.”
He waved a legal-size manila folder over his head in triumph. “November. Nineteen-seventy-one. Snellville, Georgia. A twenty-four-year-old black man named Isaac Pettibone, who worked in the local sporting goods store, was found lynched from a tree in the piney woods outside of town by two hunters.” Fathon was reciting from memory, the closed folder still clenched in his hand. “The sheriff’s department conducted an investigation and discovered that Mr. Pettibone, a reliable worker and as I recall quite an athlete himself, had been promoted from stock boy to sales clerk at the store, the first black clerk ever at the store, and that he had immediately run into some difficulty with a white colleague, a clerk by the name of Felker. Ed Felker was also in his twenties and, as luck would have it, the son of a good ole boy named Thomas Felker, who a few years before had been the Exalted Cyclops of the Snellville Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, he must’ve been a cyclops, because he didn’t see too well. Ran his car off the road one night, flipped over, and paralyzed himself from the waist down. Of course, his blood alcohol level might also have had something to do with it. In any case, his son Ed, who seemed to have inherited his father’s love of whiskey and hatred of the black man, didn’t like it when Isaac Pettibone was promoted at the store. There were words between them, apparently a bit of a flare-up in front of some white customers. Isaac probably held his own with Felker.”
Now Charlie Fathon sat down across the table from Harvey, who was mesmerized both by Fathon’s command of the facts and the seamlessness of his presentation. “The sheriff’s people didn’t have any trouble turning up this much, of course, but they also turned up another coworker at the store to whom Ed Felker had said something to the effect that he was ‘going to get that nigger.’ Plus his only alibi was his wife, whose claim that Ed was at home with her all night lacked both enthusiasm and credibility, given that another interview, with one of the wife’s friends, had established that the wife complained often that Ed spent most evenings out of the house. The time of Mr. Pettitbone’s death, by the way, was set at between ten and midnight.”
Fathon now opened the folder in front of him, and Harvey saw a few newspaper clippings on top. “But what really did Ed in,” Fathon continued, “was the fact that he neglected to dispose of the wool plaid hunting jacket he wore the night of the lynching. In fact, he put it right back on a peg by the door of the trailer he shared with his wife. Which was a terrible error on his part, because the sheriff’s men, God bless them, found some fibers on Mr. Pettibone’s pant cuffs—his feet, of course, were bound—that perfectly matched the wool fibers of tha
t jacket. And that, even in Georgia, where the chances of convicting a white for killing a black were still about the same as finding a Swiss watch in a bowl of cheese grits, was enough to do Ed Felker in.
“The DA actually offered to bargain with Ed Felker if he would be so kind as to name any others who were involved, since it’s unlikely that one man alone could subdue and hang another. However, loyalty to friends, if not to the law, was one virtue that Felker did possess in some abundance, and he refused to name anyone else. In the end he was convicted of murder in the second degree—thank God for the movement!—and went to prison for the next twenty-five years or so. He was released a few years ago and tried to get back together with his wife, who had never remarried, although I understand she had plenty of boyfriends. She wasn’t having any of that conjugal stuff, though, and in any case, in an act of divine justice in my view, he contracted lung cancer and was dead within eighteen months of his release.”
“And you’re handling the case because you’re determined to find his accomplices?” Harvey asked.
Fathon wagged his head. “Until recently the Pettibone case wasn’t on our radar screen. And the fact is that we’re not even actively pursuing it now. After all, there was an arrest, a conviction, and a long prison sentence, and on the theory that half a loaf is better than none, the case came to be widely considered closed a long time ago. Triage, Mr. Blissberg. So many homicidal bigots, so little time. We have to concentrate on those cases where (a) there is new information and (b) there have been no arrests in the past, or arrests and no convictions.”
“Then why do you even have a file?”
“Well, now, that’s an interesting little story. Some months after Ed’s death, his wife was sorting through his papers. Lo and behold, there in a locked box with some of her early love letters to him and some insurance papers, in a sealed envelope, were two black-and-white snapshots that are now in a safe here. These are the eight-by-ten glossies we made from them.”
Fathon handed them to Harvey. The first showed a bareheaded young man in his twenties wearing a plaid flannel hunting jacket. His hands were stuck in his pants pockets, almost sheepishly, and the faintest of smiles played on his lips as he looked into the camera lens. It was as if some secret pride had barely won out over his natural disinclination to be photographed. Behind him and over his left shoulder the source of this pride, Isaac Pettibone, dressed in soiled and bloody clothes, bound hand and foot, dangled limply from a pine limb by his now unnaturally long neck.
“That’s ole Ed Felker there,” Fathon said. “No doubt about that.”
Harvey looked at the second photo, almost a duplicate of the first. Same basic composition, same black man hanging in the background, but Felker had been replaced, presumably by the man who had taken his picture. This young man, in a work shirt and straw cowboy hat tipped back on his head, just as Cherry Ann had remembered, was a little stockier than the first and less coy about looking into the camera. In his eyes there was no trace of ambivalence; instead, as Harvey read his expression, there was a tincture of defiance, as if to say, “Yeah, I killed a nigger. You want to make something of it?” There was nothing much to say about his face, with its incipient jowliness and dark sideburns. The South was full of these fleshy, good old Anglo-Saxon boys.
“What do you know about him?” Harvey asked.
“Nothing. Didn’t even know he existed until a few weeks ago. I just can’t get over the fact they took each other’s picture, like they were paying homage to an earlier age, creating their own incriminating souvenirs. Like they were signing their names to the job.”
“Who do you think developed these?”
“I suspect one of these fellows did. The original prints were obviously tray-processed. They weren’t fixed properly, judging from the brown spots. And the matte finish suggests they were air dried.”
Harvey studied the second photo, wondering what—and who—Cherry Ann had seen in it. “So Ed Felker’s wife found these. How’d they end up in your hands?”
“The newspaper up in Marietta did a little story on her discovery. Can’t say what Connie Felker’s motives were, talking about it, but she did, there was no love lost between her and old Ed, and one of our investigators ran across the piece—picture of her holding up the two photos and all—and we approached her to give us the photos in the interests of justice. She told us she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with them, that she already had a local private collector offering her a lot of money for them, but she hadn’t decided what to do. Well, then I went up to Marietta to sweeten her tea a little. So I told Connie that if she’d donate the photos to GURCC, why, I’d make sure she was properly compensated. And she couldn’t see anything wrong with that.” He smiled at Harvey. “We can’t be above a little quid pro quo now and then, can we?
“Now we showed that photograph around”—he laid a dark forefinger on the young man in the straw cowboy hat—“and, of course, a lot of people saw the photo in the Constitution, and the fact is that no one has any idea who he is. And Ed Felker is in his grave. And we went on about our business. Now you call me yesterday to say that Maurice’s lady friend thought she recognized him. Where’d she think she knew him from?”
“She just had a feeling. I’d like to send a copy to her. See if it’ll jog her memory.”
“There’s a Kinko’s not far from here. Open all night.”
“I’d also like to study that file, if I may.”
“There’s not much in it, but I don’t see why you can’t have it overnight. There’s a copy of the sheriff’s report, but no trial transcript.” He handed the file to Harvey. “You got a place to stay tonight, Mr. Blissberg?”
“I thought maybe you could recommend a cheap motel.”
“I can recommend a cheap sofabed, if you don’t mind clutter.”
“I couldn’t impose.”
“You didn’t. I offered. C’mon, after Kinko’s we’ll run by the Varsity for some onion rings.”
“All right, I accept. On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You start calling me Harvey. By the way, is Snellville, Georgia, near Wyckoff?”
“Wyckoff?” Fathon said. “You mean, the home of the headless lawn jockeys? It’s maybe twenty miles away.”
“I’m just thinking,” Harvey said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Fathon said, turning off the light in the room and ushering Harvey back into the hallway. “You’re thinking that the fellow who’s after Maurice is the one in that photo there. That he thinks Maurice and his lady friend are onto him after all these years.”
“I know it sounds improbable.”
“The improbable doesn’t scare me, Harvey. I’ve only been a lawyer for five years, but I’ve already seen a few cases broken wide open by a fluke. But, tell me—how do you suppose that this fellow found out that Maurice and his lady friend were even looking at the photo?”
“I have a thought about that,” Harvey said as Fathon flipped off the lights in the rest of the offices of the Georgia Unsolved Race Crimes Clearinghouse. “I’ll let you know if I’m right.”
19
BY NOON THE NEXT day, Sunday, Harvey rolled into Athens, Georgia, in his rented Pontiac Grand Am. He felt the rush of heightened awareness, a tingle of worldliness, that came on him whenever he entered an unfamiliar town. Everything assumed a cinematic clarity. Even the gas station attendant who gave him directions to Clay Chirmside’s street seemed as vivid as a veteran character actor. Harvey almost complimented him on his accent.
Before he left Charlie Fathon’s, he had made four phone calls. He’d made sure Moss was all right in New York and that Cherry Ann Smoler was safe in Providence and would be at her friend’s the next day to receive the overnighted copy of the photograph. Then he reached Mickey in her Pittsburgh hotel, where she was working “a big Pirates-Diamondbacks clash” that evening.
“Whatcha doing?” he asked.
“Reading a book review from the Londo
n Review of Books on the Internet. Want to hear something interesting?”
“Sure.”
“The slug has a penis that’s seven times the length of its body.”
One could do worse, Harvey thought, than share life with a sports reporter who read the London Review of Books online, although perhaps one could do better than share life with a person who found the most interesting thing in it a passage about slug penises.
“They often get knotted up with other slug penises,” she said.
“I hate when that happens.”
“The only way for them to get free is for one slug to bite off his own penis at the base.”
“Couldn’t he nibble off just enough to get untangled?”
“Here’s the best part,” she said. “The self-castrated slug immediately becomes a female.”
“Would that it were so easy.”
“What are you doing?”
“Getting ready to drive off to Athens, Georgia, to talk to someone who’s pretending to be a journalist.”
“Oh,” she said “Just like me.”
The fourth call was to make sure that Clay Chirmside was in town.
“Mr. Chirmside?” he said from Fathon’s disheveled apartment.
“Speaking.” Spuheekun, it came out. A deep drawl.
“Are you the one writing the article about GURCC?”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr. Chirmside, my name is Harvey. I used to work at GURCC, and I’ve got some information about the organization that might interest you. I’ll swing by this afternoon.” And Harvey hung up, hoping that would be enough to hold him.
Chirmside’s house was a red brick bungalow on a working-class suburban street with a new Ford pickup in the driveway. Its lone bumper sticker said, “If at First You Don’t Secede, Try Try Again.” The cement urns on either side of the front steps gushed ferns. When Harvey got out of his air-conditioned car, the humidity whacked him in the face like a hot pillow. Before he had taken three steps, the bungalow’s screen door opened.